BOSTON — The search for evidence in the Boston Marathon bombings sent investigators combing through a landfill in New Bedford, Mass., on Thursday, April 25, for a laptop computer belonging to one of the suspects, a law enforcement official said.

Investigators have been searching for days for the laptop that they believe belonged to one of the two brothers suspected of setting off bombs at the Boston Marathon last week that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others, law enforcement officials said.

They believe the computer might have been thrown out, and they searched a landfill near the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, where Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, 19, who was charged in the bombings this week, was a student.

Details continued to emerge about the bombing plot and last week’s manhunt. Among them: New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Tsarnaev told investigators from his hospital bed that he and his older brother, Tamerlan, had decided to drive to New York last Thursday night to use their remaining explosive devices in Times Square.

Law enforcement officials confirmed Bloomberg’s account but said the brothers’ intention appeared to have been more of a spontaneous idea than a real, thought-out plan.

Bloomberg and New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said they were briefed on the New York plot on Wednesday by the task force investigating the Boston bombing.

Rep. Peter King, R-N.Y., told CNN that the city should have been told earlier.

“Even though this may or may not have been spontaneous, for all we know there could be other conspirators out there, and the city should have been alerted so it could go into its defensive mode,” he said.

Officials continued to revise and, in some cases, correct some of their initial accounts of the manhunt during the fast-moving events of last week.

An armed carjacking that state and federal officials at first said had occurred in Cambridge, Mass., actually appears to have taken place across the Charles River in Allston, a Boston neighborhood, several law enforcement officials said Thursday.

Cambridge police spokesman Dan Riviello said authorities were trying to sort out whether the suspects, believed to be the brothers, had a car, or what car they used, in fleeing the shooting that night of an MIT police officer in Cambridge, a few miles from Allston.

Angel Sifontes, 27, who works at a gas station in Allston, said detectives investigating the carjacking had visited the station to see whether its cameras had caught any images of the crime. He said the carjacking was apparently out of range of the cameras.

Cambridge police initially said the carjacking had been carried out by two men “in the area of Third Street in Cambridge.” An FBI affidavit accompanying the criminal complaint against Dzhokhar Tsarnaev that was unsealed Monday said “an individual carjacked a vehicle at gunpoint in Cambridge, Massachusetts.”

Christina Sterling, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Massachusetts, said Thursday that officials had written “Cambridge” in the affidavit because that is what investigators believed at the time. She said that “has since changed.”

A law enforcement official said that, although ballistics tests were still being performed, officials believed that most of the bullets fired in a shootout between the police and the brothers in Watertown, Mass., early Friday morning were fired by police officers.

One law enforcement official said that “most of the expended rounds were from law enforcement, no doubt about it.”

Only one gun has been recovered from the brothers, officials said.

The law enforcement official, noting that the brothers had thrown explosive devices during the battle, including a pressure-cooker bomb similar to the ones used at the marathon, said it was “like a combat situation.”

Tamerlan Tsarnaev was mortally wounded after the confrontation.

“Anybody in the area was trying to shoot them, which is within protocol,” the official said. “Every time that an explosive device went off, somebody took a shot.”

Several law enforcement officials said that because Dzhokhar Tsarnaev did not have a gun when he was captured after the shootout, hiding in a boat in a nearby back yard, the gunshot wound in his neck could not have been self-inflicted, as some law enforcement officials had said they believed earlier.

Contrary to initial reports that the police had exchanged gunfire with the suspect, officials said it appeared police fired into the boat after they saw something push through the boat’s tarp and feared it might be an explosive device or a gun.

“One officer then fired,” the law enforcement official said. “The other officers there, hearing a shot going off, thought it was coming from the suspect and started shooting until the cease-fire was ordered.”

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